Survey: Major Political Violence Thought Likely in USA

 The survey out of UC Davis is interesting, but note up front the funding statement:

This work was supported by grants from the Joyce Foundation, the California Wellness Foundation, and the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by the California Firearm Violence Research Center and UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program.

These are all left-wing activist organizations that strongly favor gun control. That doesn't mean the survey methodology is bad; it just means that the kind of people they'd fund are the kind of people whose cognitive biases point in the direction of the conclusions they want drawn. (Also the kind of people who could get tenure at UC Davis, I suppose.)

It hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but it is a fairly large survey of 8,620 people nationwide. There were just over half women surveyed, which is approximately correct to the general population; but the median age at 48 is about a decade older than for the population as a whole. 

There is a big delta between attitudes about the probability and attitudes about practice. First:

Two-thirds of respondents (67.2%, 95% CI 66.1%, 68.4%) perceived “a serious threat to our democracy,” but more than 40% agreed that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy” and that “in America, native-born white people are being replaced by immigrants.” Half (50.1%) agreed that “in the next few years, there will be civil war in the United States.”

However, only about two thirds of the total were willing to concede that violence was even sometimes justified in politics. (It is, sometimes, or the Declaration of Independence makes no sense.) Of those:

12.2% were willing to commit political violence themselves “to threaten or intimidate a person,” 10.4% “to injure a person,” and 7.1% “to kill a person.” Among all respondents, 18.5% thought it at least somewhat likely that within the next  few years, in a situation where they believed political violence was justified, “I will be armed with a gun”; 4.0% thought it at least somewhat likely that “I will shoot someone with a gun.”

Those numbers are a lot less threatening. "At least somewhat likely," when you look at the polling questions, means getting to add up every answer except "Not likely" or "Not willing." You're still only getting to seven percent of the subset who are even willing to contemplate killing anybody, and only four percent of that subset who think there is any likelihood whatsoever of them shooting anybody.

It's oddly encouraging, then. In spite of all the appearance of danger, and all the anger, almost no one is actually intending to kill or shoot anybody. Of course, it may only take a single match to start a wildfire if the ground is dry enough.